


The White Violin

by DaneelsSoul



Category: Homestuck, The Laundry Files - Charles Stross
Genre: Eldritch Horrors, More characters to come
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-08-17
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2018-12-16 11:01:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11827368
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/DaneelsSoul/pseuds/DaneelsSoul
Summary: The story of Rose Lalonde and her adventures involving a secret agency, the fate of the world, and her white violin.





	1. An Unusual Interview

Your name is Rose Lalonde. Your mother used to say that you would do great things one day. You wonder if she knew that at the age of 15 you would be spending what feels like half your day filling out paperwork. You work for the Laundry, an agency that supposedly exists to fight the demons from beyond the world, hiding at the bottom of the Mandelbrot set, gnashing their teeth, yearning for a chance to enter local spacetime and wreak havoc. You stand between Earth and the gods beyond, but secretly you think that the battle has already been lost to the true horror from the outer realms: bureaucracy. Summoned from the void into the halls of ancient Byzantium, this creeping horror has slowly spread its tendrils over the human world, binding souls with its tendrils of red tape, whispering the secrets of how to turn people into interchangeable cogs in its gargantuan machine, slowly shaping the world towards some unknown purpose.

Or at least those thoughts keep your mind occupied as you fill in your biographic information for what feels like at least the hundredth time today, read the briefing on CRIMSON SYMPHONY, and review the protocols for checking out eldritch artifacts from the vault. The whole process would probably be a good deal less mind numbing if they had provided you with half a clue what all the new busywork was for, but relevant information is by and large too much to hope for from the Laundry, and so you are forced to suffer in ignorance. After what feels like a geological epoch, you finally manage to dot the final ‘i’ and cross the final ‘t’. You return the completed papers. You are relieved to find that the officer who collects them has not managed to evolve back into a trilobite, and are hoping to finally get some answers.

The man behind the desk accepts your paperwork, and begins to page through it with a bored look on his face. You sigh and begin to tap your foot impatiently as you start to wonder what this is all about, but despite your best efforts, you are unable to imagine what about you might have grabbed the attention of the organization.

“You play violin, yes?”

You look over to see that the functionary has set down your paperwork and is looking in askance at you. You nod your assent, and he turns to a safe behind him.

“Can I know what this is about?” You ask as he fiddles with the combination lock. In response, he finishes with the safe and takes out what appears to be a white, almost coffin shaped violin case, which he lays on the table followed by a small key.

“Take this to the practice room two doors down the hall,” he points out the door to your room while making a tapping motion with his hand to designate a direction. “Play scales and easy, standard pieces only. No improvising. Keep the instrument locked away while not in use, use it only while in the practice room, and return it here when you are done. We shouldn’t need you to play for more than ten minutes. Do you have any questions?”

You give the man a flat look, “You mean other than why a secretive government organization needs to give violin lessons to fifteen year old girls? Are the higher ups so desperate to find for entertainment for the next holiday party that they have decided that this is a good use of taxpayer money?”

“Sorry,” he replies in what almost sounds like an apologetic tone. “That’s all I can tell you for now. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” you sigh. “Can we get this over with?”

He nods, sliding the case towards you across the desk. You snatch the key and grab the case by the handle, and head over to the room that had been specified, seething over the perpetual need to keep you in the dark about even the most basic things. You find your way to the room without difficulty, closing the door behind you. With some fidgeting you eventually manage to figure out where to insert the key in order to unlock the case, which you promptly open.

Inside you find a bone white violin. You pick it up to investigate and find that the body is composed of many long, thin strips of some slightly rough material, intricately carved and fitted together in patterns that make your eyes hurt if you stare into them for too long. You shake your head and look away, you have no idea how such an instrument will actually play, but you might as well see what you can accomplish. You remove the bow from the case, and bring the strange instrument to your chin.

Running the bow quickly over the strings, you are greeted with a horrid screeching accompanied by eerie overtones well beyond what should be produced by an instrument of this type. You nearly lose your grip at the unanticipated noise, but quickly recover. You sigh and begin the arduous task of tuning the violin.

This proves to be substantially more challenging than you initially anticipated. The strings seem to posses minds of their own, always managing to fall just far enough away from the tone you are aiming for to be disconcerting and to produce ghastly harmonies with each other. After a not inconsiderable struggle, you finally manage to arrange things into some sufficient approximation of the standard temperament.

With that chore out of the way, you decide to warm up with a few scales. It has been a while since you last practiced, but your muscle memory seems to be intact, and the correct mindset begins to rapidly return to you. Your instrument seems more or less cooperative despite some of the odd harmonics that continue to make themselves known. After the third time up and down, the notes begin to start sounding strangely clipped. You try to readjust your bow technique but to no avail, as you start to feel an aura of impatience coming from your instrument. You proceed with a bit more experimentation, but the effect does not seem to go away.

You sigh and spend a moment finding an appropriate selection, eventually deciding on Beethoven’s [Minuet in G](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zSXRJwspGU0). After a brief pause to reassure yourself that everything is arranged properly, you begin to play. The first measures come out more or less as expected, but as the notes flow by, you begin to develop a growing sense in unease. Unusual resonances arise, leading to a general feeling wholly disjointed from that which you had intended. You struggle to adjust your technique, but this seems to serve only to make the piece more inconsistent as musician and instrument fight for control. This continues for most of a minute until you reach the more upbeat section of the piece, and the notes degrade into a series of dissonant shrieks.

You raise your bow, and lower the violin in front of your face to better inspect it. You run your hand along the seams in its body. “What are you?” you wonder out loud.  The white material is clearly not the traditional wood, and is probably responsible for the unusual sounds the instrument produces, rendering it unfit for cheery music. You mutter to it, wondering what it would want to play, trying to match its sound to a piece that will not be mangled by it. As if in answer, a memory rises from the depths of your past. A short, [haunting refrain](https://homestuck.bandcamp.com/track/aggrieve-violin-refrain-2) from lessons long gone, one that just might work with the strange tone of the tool at hand. And so after taking a moment to reset your posture, you begin to play.

The difference is apparent from the moment the bow touches the strings. The eerie sounds are still there, but now they seem to complement the intent of the piece rather than fight against it. You close your eyes as the notes begin to flow from you, bridging the gap of years between today and your childhood lessons. The music is grand and terrifying and beautiful beyond anything you have played before. The ghosts of images dance before your closed eyes. A world of towering structures, long abandoned, resting in the glow of a violet moon. Your music reaches a final, piercing, high note, and a pair of fangs flash before your vision. You gasp and drop your bow as you feel a sharp pain in your neck. You pull the violin from your chin to see a drop of blood near the base being slowly absorbed into the intricate patterns along the body.

You stare frozen for a minute before you regain enough compose to force your limbs back into motion. You hurriedly put the thing back away in its case and locking it away again. You return the box to the safe, and scurry home as expeditiously as you can manage.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ...And we're off. Don't worry, I should get around to explaining how a 15 year old girl (admittedly one with an unhealthy obsession with the arcane) came into the employ of Britain's occult intelligence service. But this story started from the simple seed of Rose playing a white violin and grew from there, so this seemed like the most natural beginning. All in all, if I actually get around to finishing this it should comprise 20 to 30 chapters and take a few years to write.
> 
> In any case, the rules of the game for this AU are that I am putting Homestuck characters into the world of the Laundry Files. It should hopefully be intelligible without knowledge of either of the source works (though if you somehow decided to try reading this without experience with either, I am flattered and confused), and shouldn't spoil either of them much. 
> 
> Also, for those keeping score at home in terms of the Laundry Files timeline this takes place sometime between The Rhesus Chart and The Annihilation Score. On the other hand, exact chronology comparisons are probably a bit silly since I'm not even sure if Bob Howard even exists in this universe. Or maybe he does exist and is just played by Jake English or something.
> 
> Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.


	2. Things that go Bump

That night finds you in your room, ensconced in your sheets, reading by the light of a small lamp. A tale of wizards and magic, scholarly devotion to the arcane arts paired with plots and deception threatening to bring down the academy. You move to turn the page, when you hear a loud thump coming from the floors below you. Probably just your mother running afoul of a houseplant while in her usual drunken stupor. You shake your head as you return to your reading only to be interrupted as a much louder crashing sound rattles the house.

  
“Mom?” You call out. Several seconds pass in eerie silence as you wait for a reply. “Mother? Are you there?” Still nothing. With a sigh, you mark your place in the book and rouse yourself from your bed. It would not do to leave her to her own devices should something serious have happened.

  
You leave your room and head down the stairs toward the cavernous space that makes up your living room. It is dark inside the house, and you use the railing to guide your steps as you slowly make your way down the stairs. As your eyes adjust, you can slowly begin to make out the shadows of various pieces of household furniture.

  
Having reached the living room, you have no earthly idea where to go next. You ponder your situation, but don’t have long to think before you are interrupted by a scream coming from below you. You hurry towards the basement stairs, cursing quietly as you stub your toe on the couch along the way, and make your way down.

  
The basement is dimly illuminated by the LEDs on racks on computers and the faint glow of monitors. You mother is using them for some new project- somewhere between a physics experiment and the next big MMO. You never really did figure out the details. A large monitor catches your eye. It’s display shows an odd spirograph pattern, twisting and changing is strangely beautiful patterns. You take a half-involuntary step towards it, as your mind is drawn in, trying to capture the pattern.

  
A crash snaps you out of your reverie. You wrench your eyes away from the screen, and make your way to the next room. As you enter, you see what you can only describe as imps. Two humanoid creatures, not more than a meter tall. They stand hunched over, jet black except for their pearly white fangs and narrow, glowing eyes. Long, crooked arms end in wicked-looking claws. The imps turn towards you as you enter, and you turn to flee the other way.

  
You run as the imps crash after you. You stumble past glowing lights, unable to think far beyond the next couple of footfalls. You scamper through a doorway, and find that you have barely enough leeway to slam the metal door behind you. You can hear the imps smashing against the door as you press your back to it in order to hold it closed. You can feel the rattling sounds of the imps attacks against the door, but at least you have a chance to catch your breath and take stock of the situation. You begin to scan the room, searching for something to hold the portal closed more permanently. Computers. A monitor. More computers. Some weird console. Maybe you could move it. Looking more carefully you note the figure slumped down in front of it. She’s wearing your mom’s white lab coat, sitting haphazardly on the floor with her head slumped back against the side of the console.

  
“Mom” You cry as you rush over to her. At the noise she seems to start. Her head twists forwards in order to face you, as if unaccustomed to the motion. Her stilted limb motions begin to push her body into a state of feral readiness. Something about the movement feels wrong, and you stop several steps before reaching her. You gaze upon your mother and something seems to be off. She appears unhurt, but something about her bearing, and her expression seem unnatural, like something with no true idea of what is means to be human. And then you see a glint in her eyes. Small green specks swimming about them just below the surface. You stand enraptured, wondering what it is that you are seeing when she lunges at you.

  
You scream and fall over backwards to avoid her grasp. You knock over a rack of servers pulling yourself to your feet as she lurches after you. A last glance over your shoulder reveals the imps beginning to push through the door as you dash off into the next room. You run until you reach the far wall and begin frantically searching for another door, only to realize that you are trapped, your mother’s form now blocking the only exit. You wrack your brain, trying to remember some piece of lore to defend yourself with. You yank a cable from a nearby computer and hastily arrange it into a rough approximation of the elder sign. You place yourself in the middle of the diagram, as the imps close in, snarling and scratching, but you find them to be unwilling or unable to approach any closer. You cower as you watch the tall, white figure behind them slowly closing in towards you. Somehow your eyes are drawn to the monitor behind her. Four strange planets orbit a large spherical chessboard. As you watch, the screen zooms in one of the worlds. Yellow clouds float over alien sands, and the rainbow waters beneath them. Your gaze in drawn in, feeling the world get closer and closer almost as if your could step through the screen into it.

  
A sudden scream wrenches your attention back to the danger in front of you. The creature inside your mother lets out a blaring screech as black tendrils fall from her mouth. She screams again and again, with increasing volume as the world around her begins to warp and bend, everything starting to go black. You struggle to hold on as the world dissolves around you, to no avail. You come shuttering awake to the blaring of your alarm clock.

* * *

  
You skin feels clammy and your breath comes in rapid bursts, but the regular roaring of the alarm slowly draws you back to reality. Eventually you turn it off. You groan as you sit up and run your hand over your face, but half of your mind is still back in that day.

  
It’s been over two years since your mother died and your world was turned upside down. You used to hope that magic existed so that you might one day learn to practice the arcane arts. You thought it would be exciting, and romantic. Now you know better.  
There are many worlds beyond this one, and while your universe and the others do not overlap physically, they are joined by the platonic realm of mathematics, and when your thoughts in this world impact upon that, they have echoes in the worlds beyond. In days gone by, a poor understanding of the theory meant that sorcerers would stumble upon their powers by accident and the few known rituals would be kept as closely guarded secrets. Today however, taking calculus is a common rite of passage, and the ubiquitous presence of computers allows for exactly the kind of experimentation that can prove accidentally fatal.

  
They say your mother was an exceptional case, for whatever comfort that provides. She had apparently discovered an equivalent formulation of the first three Turing theorems, and had been experimenting alone on her basement supercomputer when things went awry. She was gone from the moment that the feeders took up residence behind her eyes, and you were nearly taken as well. Your survival was due only to the fact that your curiosity in the eldritch had lead you to a few genuine pieces of knowledge. Even then, you would have been lost had you not happened to choose a conductive material for drawing your ward (there’s a reason that the ancients used to use blood for the purpose). Furthermore, the design you used had an instability in its third harmonic, which means that it would have collapsed shortly had the laundry’s rapid response team not arrived to put an end to the invaders.

  
You had nightmares of that evening nearly every night for months after the event, but you had recently started to hope that you were finally free of them. It appears that it was too much to ask. At least the rainbow planet was new.

  
You rub your eyes one final time, to remove the last vestiges of the dream from your mind. You throw your legs over the side of the bed and onto the floor, only to be met with a sharp pain as your foot hits the ground. You jerk it back and look to see a throwing star skittering across the floor. Dammit Dirk!


End file.
